


G series

by marginaliana



Series: letter series [2]
Category: British Comedy RPF, QI (TV) RPF
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-26
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2021-01-04 01:56:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21189659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marginaliana/pseuds/marginaliana
Summary: The thing about trying to out-clever Stephen Fry, Alan thinks, is that it never, ever works.





	G series

**Author's Note:**

> Another fic I've dug out of the unfinished file from ages and ages ago. This one is genuinely not finished and I've marked the missing plot in brackets where it would have been. Hopefully the rest can be enjoyed. This would have been the follow up to F Series.

The thing about trying to out-clever Stephen Fry, Alan thinks, is that it never, ever works.

Stephen is the cleverest person he's ever met – not just smart (though that would be bad enough), but clever, with the kind of mind that can turn everything you know inside out without stopping for breakfast. It's the kind of mind that ought to come with a sticky-label warning: "Please use your powers for good, not evil."

It makes Alan depressed.

"I'm melancholy," he announces, striding across the worn wooden floor of the pub and flopping into a chair beside Bill at their usual corner table. Jo, sitting on the other side, looks at him over what would have been her glasses, had she been wearing any.

"You're late is what you are," she says.

Alan waves that off. "I was being held prisoner by my own deep and tragic pain."

"The same deep and tragic pain that's making you grumpy?" asks Bill sarcastically.

"I am not grumpy," Alan says. "I am melancholy." Jo makes a rude gesture not quite out of sight under the table, and in retaliation, Alan steals a handful of her chips.

* * *

Once Alan is fed and he's had a pint, he feels decidedly less melancholy. Unfortunately, that appears to have left room for him to feel other things.

"Maybe I was crap," he says. "At first I thought it was just that he was feeling guilty for corrupting my young and innocent soul or some bollocks like that, but now he won't even take my calls. I'm starting to get a complex." He tries to make that last bit sound like a joke, and pretends he doesn't see the glance that Bill and Jo are exchanging.

He'd thought— he'd thought it was brilliant, actually. After Stephen had got Alan off that first time, he'd fucked him hard against the dressing table (so hard, in fact, that Alan had got three splinters in his left hand). Alan had been cursing and begging for it, and Stephen had been stifling his moans in the back of Alan's shirt and digging his fingertips into Alan's thigh as he slammed into him, and he'd certainly come with great abandon. After that he'd got Alan off _again_, and then kissed him, and Alan had left for his own dressing room in a state of intense satisfaction.

Except they haven't repeated the experience, haven't even so much as had lunch together without five researchers and a producer sitting between them.

"So," Jo says, leaning back in her chair and looking bored. "You have a madcap plan, then? A scheme of wacky shenanigans designed to regain the fickle attentions of your onetime lover?"

"_Someone's_ been watching too much Coronation Street," Bill mutters.

"Fuck off," says Jo. "Madcap wacky plans have a far longer history than bloody Coronation Street. Even fucking Shakespeare had madcap plans."

"Is that your evidence in favor?" Bill shoots back. "Because Shakespeare had incest and murder and regicide, too, but I don't see you going, 'Well, that's all right, then.'"

Alan decides he'd better jump in before one of them decides to do Hamlet right here in the pub. "Actually," he says, and both of the others turn to look at him, surprised almost like they'd forgotten he was there. "Actually, I don't think so. I tried one cunning plan, and it only got me so far. He's not going to go for it again."

"What, then?" Jo asks. "You've got to do something, because I'm not having you sitting around and moping about this. You're enough of a plonker even when you're not pining."

"I don't know! Just… I tried being clever and couldn't manage it, so…"

"No, wait," says Jo. "That's it."

"What?" says Alan.

"Out-stupid him!" she says. 

"Well, it'd be playing to his strengths, I suppose," says Bill. Alan gives him a sour look.

* * *

[various banter-y bits of Alan being deliberately, ridiculously ignorant]

* * *

"The largest country in the Caribbean is Cuba, of course," Stephen says, reading from a cue card. "Followed by Hispaniola and Jam—"

"Jo Brand's just been there," Alan says.

"Jamaica?" Stephen asks automatically.

"No, she wanted to go," Alan says, and the audience groans loudly. Stephen groans too, probably because he knows he should have seen that coming. 

"_Really, Alan,_" he says. 

"I knew I could get you to set that up," Alan says.

The audience laughs, and Stephen gives him a look that says he's fond but trying to hide it. Only this time, the trying to hide it bit is stronger.

* * *

[more banter-y bits]

* * *

"I haven't the faintest idea why you're being so persistent," Stephen says, brow furrowed in an expression of faint puzzlement. "You got what you wanted, after all."

"Did I?" Alan asks, bewildered. He feels actually, acutely stupid right now, as if Stephen's brain has raced far ahead of him and his own is left struggling even to find the path to follow.

"Didn't you? You've had me, and isn't that what your little game was all about?"

"_Fuck you_," Alan says. "No, that's not what it was about." The accusation stings, because maybe that had been part of what he'd wanted at first – to conquer the untouchable Stephen Fry, to _win_, for once. But it hadn't been _all_ he'd wanted.

[and then they communicate like adults at last]

[and then they bone]

[the end]


End file.
